Castle Paradox

[Newbie_Power]

I was talking about Native Americans, in response to Camdog's comment.

I only now figured out the bigger discussion was about the Aztecs.

[J.A.R.S.]

in which case they didn't have fortifications by the way. These big maian temples didn't serve defensive purposes... Nor did they use the bow as an offensive method for that matter, which makes it well... actually, it puts all other native americans out of the topic

[Newbie_Power]

This topic is just becoming confusing...

What the heck is everyone talking about? I am assuming that Native North American Indians were mentioned, but then somebody is going to smack me with "Native American can refer to South America as well!"

[J.A.R.S.]

as far as I'm concerned, we were talking about bows, since it is the closest tie we had to the actual topic name... bows used as weapons, aka not as hunting weaponry. The north american indigene did never really use the bow for war, don't get me wrong, thety were fans of tomahawks in the Cris tribes and all, but they truly fought with axes more than bows, and later on, with guns... bows never really made it into their arsenal, so whatever movie you see where they use a bow is just wrong...

[Newbie_Power]

I'm just going to stop debating.

[Rinku]

The Aztecs did sacrifice a lot of people, and eat their remains, largely because they didn't have much meat, but also because they felt that the sun wouldn't rise the next morning unless it received huge periodic human sacrifices. Most of their wars were intended to capture sacrifices, and they usually invaded small outlaying tribes and brought back a few thousand people at a time. I researched them a bit for ZfRT, which has a similar premise (where they sacrifice people to the turtles rather than to the sun).
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Tower Defense Game

[Camdog]

[Rinku]

In the context of the discussion, it was clear that walls was meant in the sense of defensive fortifications.

And about the Mayans -- the reason they didn't consider defending themselves is probably because they had no strong neighbors, so they never bothered setting up a real army. Lesson learned.
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Tower Defense Game

[J.A.R.S.]

agreed
and we were using the bow cause we were talking bout ranged/melee stances in combat I believe.

[Camdog]

[J.A.R.S.]

[Rinku]

I didn't make up the distinction between civilization and tribe. The basic difference is: civilizations live in cities, usually several cities under one government, and tribes are nomadic; civilizations feed themselves primarily with agriculture, whereas tribes rely primarily on hunting, gathering, and herding.

I didn't mean that they never thought about defense; they had defenses against the local barbarians, but I don't think they ever engaged in a war with another civilization. I suspect what happened was that they had some defenses set up to defend themselves against tribes, then a really smart tribal leader formed a large enough invasion force to get through that defense. It happened to China (with the Mongols and Genghis Khan) too.
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Tower Defense Game

[The Drizzle]

[Rinku]

The borders overlap, but the borders of most things overlap: green can overlap with blue, sometimes you can't really say whether a color is blue or green, but the names still mean something.

I'm not sure there are sedentary tribes in the sense of permanent structures. I'm sure that there are tribes that stay in the same place from year to year or from decade to decade, but I don't think there are tribes that have been in the same place for hundreds of years, usually they move around as their food source does (whether it's hunting, gathering, or shepherding, conditions like droughts and such affect the locations that they can live in). So I think food source is the best way to measure it, rather than nomadic vs cities, but that has fuzzy borders too (unless you tie it down to whether or not a people have knowledge that planting seeds produces food, which is surprisingly hard to figure out, considering it might be months before you see any growth).
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Tower Defense Game

[Camdog]